It’s Healthy to Be a Little Bit Chubby, Or Is it?

Shaw (1856-1950) said that if you want to live a long time, just eat 1/6 of what you normally consume.

According to a new study, obese people have it bad and skinny people don’t have it so good, but if you’re a little on the chubby side you have a decent chance of living forever.

I don’t know if in this study I’d be considered normal or a little on the chubby side, but I welcome this news and I think I could, if I worked on it for a long weekend, say, come up with an extra 10 pounds to be safely in the health-conscious chub-a-dub-dub category. In fact, if I let go, I might be able to do it in a sitting.

However . . . I don’t believe it, and I don’t believe it for perhaps a dumb reason, but it’s my reason, and I’m sticking with it: I see a lot of old movies. And I have a memory for dates. When somebody pops up on screen, I know when they were born and when they died, and usually the people who live the longest are the skinny people. The Fred Astaires. The George Bernard Shaws.

Now, of course, you’ll have skinny people like, say, Bogart, but he had what you might call other risk factors.

But Lyle Talbot is about the only guy I know from old movies who was on the hefty side but made it well into his nineties.

Cagney was kind of chubby. He made it to 86 and change. Actually Mae West was 88 and nobody ever accused her of being skinny. But as a general tendency. Watch an old movie and see who lived the longest. It’s the skinny people — unless they’re smoking like Bogart. You know, Katharine Hepburn, Gregory Peck, people like that.